On Gary Carter: The Kid and the kids we were

Some may know from reading my sports blog over the years that I grew up a hardcore New York Mets’ fan. I threw some personal thoughts together tonight on the passing of Gary Carter. (Note: this has been edited.)

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The Kid is gone. So are days of youth, that day of youth.

Those days recalled are a usually a pastiche, snapshots in memory that conjure a feeling for a time in your life, an emotion, cobbled from several events or even years. As the years wear on the year of these days become less relevant, less retrievable, part of a pleasant blur.

Not that day, though, the day Gary Carter debuted in New York, the day anticipation reigned.

It came in 1985, the year when I transitioned into adulthood, leaving college behind that spring and boyhood friends behind in the fall when I would move away and start my career. But first came the baseball season, the best of seasons, the greatest season of my New York Mets’ fandom, even eclipsing the title year that would follow.

Gary Carter is dead now at 57. Brain cancer Thursday took the clean-living good guy from the notoriously hard-partying team. Irony is not always funny.

He went into the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Montreal Expo, but for many he is recognized as the missing piece who delivered the Mets the 1986 World Series crown. For long-suffering fans, it was truly deliverance.

Many of my Long Island days of late youth/young adulthood in the 1980s were spent at Shea Stadium. The games, dozens if not more than a 100 – general admission seats were $4.50 or so – are largely forgotten save a detail here or there.

That’s true except for a handful of games, and especially one game, a game that pretty much encapsulates all those years, a game that captured a time in my life and all of its anticipation and hope and stupidity, too. It was a Tuesday, April 9, 1985. It was Opening Day.

Carter actually got traded to the Mets Dec. 8, 1984. (I even recall the day of the week, since the news broke on “Monday Night Football.”) He would be the final piece, we reckoned, coming after arrivals of Keith Hernandez, Daryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden.

Opening Day was one part religion, two parts baseball and, to be honest, eight parts party for my Long Island crew. We went when the Mets stunk, staking our territory out in the parking lot behind left field. We went when the Mets were great. We went when the Mets stunk again. My friends still go. I did too for awhile, until family and job and such got in the way.

We’d go to dozens of others games each year, too, some planned, some the spur of the moment, Shea about a 50 minute ride away depending on traffic. We went a lot in 1985, a fevered pennant race with the St. Louis Cardinals that went down to the final week. That season the Mets opened with the Cards. Of course we’d be there. I still had another month of college; I made the pilgrimage from St. Bonaventure in western New York.

Our circle, a couple of dozen of us, made it to our designated Section I-2 meeting spot in the lot (picture center field now at Citi Field) six hours before the first pitch. We were properly warmed up by game time. Leave it at that.

“I’m still recovering from the party,” said my friend Sigi.

Our seats were in the right field upper deck, across the way from our accustomed left field perch (Section 42) where we usually sat. That game was a hot ticket. Too hot: Sigi got busted trying to unload an extra, and was taken away by NYPD.

“I was just trying to get rid of a ticket,” he said. During much of the game, he ended up “across the street (in a station house). There were 50 to hundred people arrested. But they were nice. They brought a TV into a room.” (He ended up paying a $50 fine.)

We had spray paint for signs, and someone scrawled “Free Sigi” on the pavement. The parking section became forever known as “The Free Sigi Zone” or simply “Free Sigi.” Like I said, we weren’t quite “adults” yet.

Sigi made it back into the stadium for the last couple of innings, greeted with a standing ovation. He missed another friend named Jeff nearly toppling out of the upper deck, and two brawls not involving us that did involve entire sections, melees so out of control that they actually stopped the game. It was a pretty epic day.

He did get to see Doug Sisk walk in the tying run in the ninth, and the Mets threaten but not answer. It went to extras, with the Cardinals failing to score in the top of the 10th.

In the bottom of the inning Hernandez struck out against one of the Mets he was traded for, Neil Allen. Up walked Carter, who had doubled earlier in the game.

The moment was perfect, perfect as his swing that launched the ball to left, a line drive of a home run like so many of the 324 he would hit in his Hall of Fame career. Ballgame, 6-5.

The thing about the Shea Stadium upper deck is it would shake. Violently. Not during the down years, mind you. There were games ushers would shoo us down to better seats so they could close off the level. But on that afternoon, the day Sigi got freed and Jeff nearly went over the edge and fans brawled and Gary Carter came to town and my days of youth and hanging with my buds were winding down, that upper deck seemed ready to collapse into the mezzanine. And we didn’t care.

The Mets, the team that reeked from when we were little kids until very recently, were good. Maybe this would be our year. If not, next year would be. And it was.

But by 1986 I was living Upstate, and not making it to as many games as I did. Opening Day was still a rite, but changes were in motion. By the time my first kid arrived a decade later, even Opening Day trips ended. Then they tore down Shea, a few years after my boyhood home had been demolished by new owners.

Youth fades.

I still talk to Sigi regularly. I have no clue about the Jeff dude. And I don’t see much of the old crowd anymore: Rich and Val, Marty and Karen, Joe and Nick and Jon and Liam and Tom and Joann and Pat and Sue and Mike and Ann and Mike and the rest of our band of knuckleheads. Facebook once in awhile, and a killer reunion last fall, but that’s it.

But I think often of our days, because I know I will never have friends that close again. And when I try to focus of what it was like to be a kid, the day I come back to is the day The Kid came to town and the upper deck shook.